Reckoning with Slavery has several simultaneous goals: to foreground numeracy in the early modern articulation of racial difference, to rethink Western modernity as a product of Black erasure, and to center the commodification of African and African-descended people in the history of capitalism. At its core, though, the book seeks to provide an intellectual and social history of enslaved women as clear-eyed analysts of the system of economic extraction built on their childbearing capabilities. To follow the strategic choices that Black women made within hereditary slavery, then, is to witness the theorization of racial capitalism in real time.
Writing with insight and subtlety, Jennifer Morgan knits together the disparate historiographies of “racial ideology, economics, and the political lives of enslaved people” (17). Morgan, who has been at the forefront of Black feminist scholarship of the early modern Atlantic since the publication of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World...
